


If the Earth Ends in Fire

by BeesKnees



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, F/M, Goddesses, Gods, Victors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-26
Updated: 2015-03-26
Packaged: 2018-03-19 19:37:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3621786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeesKnees/pseuds/BeesKnees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The gods played these games, sacrificed their mortal pawns in each other's names. Finnick Odair is the champion of the goddess of the underworld; everyone knows that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If the Earth Ends in Fire

o1. _Finnick and the goddess of the underworld_

The air is damp. Finnick can feel it slide into his lungs, water competing with air. 

He's been here for three days. He ran out of drinkable water last night, the last drops clinging to his lips. He only brought the one bottle. Now there is only waiting. He's at the tip of unconsciousness though, his body tingling with its need for water. 

He remains seated, doesn't trust himself to get up and not collapse. His legs dangle in a small pool of stagnated water; he feels crusted over with the salt. She's never kept him waiting this long. (Mags had said, _Maybe it won't be you this year, darling_. But Finnick knows it will. He is hers. Everyone knows that.)

There's a flash in front of him, like water catching in the light. A ghost of a touch over his lips, more imagined than not. 

Eyes, grey, like the sea after a storm, hover above him.

“Will you wait another day?” she asks. 

“Yes,” he answers. And he does. 

…

The first time was an accident. He and Mags were hiking around the caves. Finnick doesn't even remember why. They were looking for something, something that had seemed important at the time. (He didn't know what was important then.) He'd wandered off into one of the caves higher up, the path too steep for Mags to follow him. He'd been 14, cusping out of boyhood and into adulthood. 

He'd stopped inside the cave, the light at the entrance a dim thought. He'd stepped into one of the pools, grasping at a shell at the bottom, held up to his ear just for a fleeting moment. 

And there she had been, right in front of him. Close enough that she'd traced his face with her fingers; she looked at him as if he was curiosity. Even then he knew he should be afraid, he wasn't.

“Will you be my tribute, Finnick?” she had asked, and Finnick had nodded, not trusting his voice with such an important task. (He hadn't known her name, but he'd known her all the same.) 

( _He's too young_ , Mags had tried to argue later. It didn't matter.)

He went into the arena, and spilled blood in her name. He sacrificed life for her. 

Finnick Odair is the champion of the goddess of the underworld. Everyone knows that. He's fought for her three years in a row. And he has no intention of stopping.

…

He sleeps for handfuls of hours, and wakes to the parching feel of his own thirst. The hunger is long since forgotten. His mind feels like a weak thing, and he wonders how long it will be before he starts to hallucinate. He watches the shadows start to grow long. 

It's nightfall before she appears to him again, eyes a deep, transparent blue.

“Will you wait another day?” she asks.

“Yes,” he answers.

This time, she leaves him water, clean and clear, and he swallows it down. He doesn't worry about her deserting him. She hasn't so far, and she won't now. 

…

He has a crescent moon of a scar in between his ribs on his left side. He was stabbed the first time he fought for her, and choked on his own blood. He fell into the river, and the water surged into his lungs. The red had haloed out around him, staining the water. 

(And his only regret, even then, was that he didn't win for her. The gods played these games, sacrificed their mortal pawns in each other's names. Twenty-four tributes, each in the name of a god or goddess, but she, his goddess, had never had anyone win in her name before. And he had promised that he would do that.)

She appeared in front of him at the bottom of the river, kissed him, breathed life back into his body, and he surfaced again.

He took his competitor's throat. He won in her name. And that what he's been doing ever since.

…

He dreams stars into the dark ceiling of the cave. The moon passes in phases above him, but all he sees is her gaze in it. When he is aware of himself again, solidly rooted in his bones, he realizes his head is in her lap. She smiles down at him. (Her eyes are a turbulent green.) 

“My champion,” she murmurs, pressing a kiss to his forehead. Her hair is wild, sea-teased and tangled. Lips tinted ever so slightly blue, and seaweed strewn around her neck in long strands that just barely hide the swell of her breasts. Growing up, Finnick had always heard stories of her: her terror and her beauty in equal measures. Sailors despaired and longed to meet her. (Few had come back saying they had, that she had pulled them up from the dregs of shipwrecks, brought them to shore. These rambling drunks are usually discredited. They are ruined for their meetings with her; they might be alive, but they long to return to her arms.)

Finnick hadn't paid attention to these stories until he met her. 

“Cresta,” he breathes, smiles at her with a crooked tilt of his mouth. She runs a thumb over his lower lip, and he tastes salt for an instant. 

“Will you fight for me again?” she asks. 

He nods again, the physicality of the action cementing their bond more than the fleeting nature of words. 

She kisses him, her touch lingering. Sometimes, he thinks he's only real when he's with her. Everything else is a delusion, a fevered dream he can't shake off. They have met four times, only in this cave. She doesn't see him after he wins in her name; her favor is shown only in that she claims him again the next year. 

When he opens his eyes again, she is gone. He picks himself up off the ground and climbs back down. 

…

(“You picked him again?” the god of the hunt laughs.

“Yes,” Cresta answers. She does not laugh.)

o2. _Johanna and the god of war_

Johanna is a sliver of a girl with a blade for a body. She has three older brothers, hulking in stature, but everyone knows that Johanna Mason is the one not to cross. She is twice as smart as all of her brothers put together and five times as mean. 

She's the only who's not afraid to wander the forest at night. They all work in that forest, but they know it is untamed. They know the sort of blood-curdling horrors that wander there in night. Things older than human memory, things that their tongues don't have words for anymore. 

But Johanna takes her dogs and trudges through the trees, finds places where no humans have stepped before. The dogs cower at her heels, and she tries to call them forward, once, and then twice more, and then she leaves them behind. They sit at imagined lines, waiting for their mistress to return to them.

The moon is a hangnail tonight. Johanna's fingers wander over the rough bark to find her way. The forest creaks around her, trying to decide if it welcomes her as one of its own. But then it goes silent around her, and it's only then Johanna's heart picks up a beat. She looks around blindly, and there he is, white and gleaming even in the shadowed darkness. 

They have names for him – many and interchangeable, like his nature. He is old, has existed almost as long as humans have. His beard is weathered and white, his clothes impeccable. But the smell of blood is in the forest now, cloistering. Johanna knows it well, and she takes a step back, muscles taut. 

“Be my tribute,” the god of war says, an order, not an offer.

“No,” Johanna answers, voice strong. 

…

Her first brother dies the next day, a messy bloodshed. Their mother weeps a mourning cry. His body sits under a sheet, staining it red. 

Johanna walks back into the forest, axe in hand. The dogs don't come with her. 

The forest doesn't talk to her at all this time. It's silent as she retraces her path. The dirt has already erased her footsteps, but he's there, waiting for her.

“Be my tribute,” he says again, and Johanna throws the axe with all her strength. The blade flips over the handle, shining in the scant moonlight. Her aim is exact, but he is gone. The blade thuds into a tree, and the sound echoes through the empty forest. She doesn't retrieve her weapon. 

She heads home instead, back to her bed, where she doesn't sleep. She watches the pink of dawn wash the stars out of the sky. The sun hasn't crested completely above the horizon when her mother begins screaming. Her second brother slips off the roof, and the crunch of his neck breaking is audible in Johanna's bedroom. 

She goes back into the forest again that night. (And doesn't know she's followed, her third brother trailing behind her like a shadow.) 

The axe flings itself out of the heart of the forest, and Johanna slides to the side, unimpressed.

“You missed!” she bites off before she can stop herself. (Before she hears the thud of two knees hitting the ground.) 

He smiles at her, his teeth glinting. 

“Be my tribute,” he says again. 

Johanna stares. Her blood is singing for revenge; her silence is taken for compliance.

o3. _Katniss and the god of the hunt_

Katniss regulates her breathing. A slow in, a slow out. She keeps her knees pressed into the ground, able to feel it cold and hard through the thin fabric of her pants. The bow is balanced in between her hands, one pointed forward, the other drawn back. Her elbow is at a neat angle, and her muscles clench as she holds the arrow in place. 

The deer wanders into the line of her sight. She breathes out. Releases. The arrow flies straight, as if guided, and the kill is neat and clean. (If she had the time to worry, she would, that one day she won't catch something. But her life is a hurried rush of survival, one issue taking precedent over the other as seconds tick on.)

She bends down near the deer when she hears a quiet noise behind her. She shifts, pulling out another arrow even as she looks. A second deer. She's surprised at this one, and falters for a moment. (It would be difficult for her to bring them back together, but she figures she can leave the one and come back for it after she's hauled the first kill.)

She slips the arrow into place, repeats the process. The kill is just as neat as the first. (She hasn't had this good of a day of hunting ever. Deer are harder to catch and kill. Usually she makes do with rabbits, enough to feed her family from day to day but scarcely. And rarely ever enough to actually sell. But this should provide them with enough for at least the month.) 

She feels just a flicker of relief. She doesn't let it flame into anything akin to optimism. 

She kneels beside the first deer once more. When she hears that same noise again, she frowns. Katniss looks over her shoulder, braid falling across one shoulder. She sees muted greens and browns. Drawing another arrow, she moves, faster than before.

This arrow is caught. 

He flips it neatly over his fingers, smiling at her. Katniss pauses, surprised. She hasn't seen him in years: When she was younger and used to press her lithe body underneath the hole in the fence, she had come out to the meadow. Just to play. It was a time before survival had been her driving force, when the world was an unlimited swell of possibilities. He had always been there, waiting for her. They'd scurried up trees together; waded, naked, into the small pond at the edge of the meadow; and taken sleepy sun-laced naps together in the long grass. They had passed only a single year like that, and then she had gotten too curious. She had started asking for him around town, looking for this boy who she had befriended so easily. But he hadn't existed outside of the meadow. His name had been met with odd stares, so Katniss had stopped asking. But he had disappeared around the same time, swallowed back up by the air and sky.

She had convinced herself for awhile that she had made him up. But some part of her had always known that it wasn't that, that it he was more than what he had seemed. Her brain, so logical-oriented, had refused to give name to what she had always understood.

He is tall now, as she always suspected he would be. Broad-shouldered with rough hands come from holding bows and arrows and knives. Rough hands that come from knowing hard work. His eyes are kind, even if there is a seriousness to them.

“Hello Katniss,” he says. 

“Hello,” she answers. She stands, slowly. 

“You know who I am?” he asks. He's still holding her arrow. 

She nods. She doesn't give voice to his name, but it echoes inside of her all the same: _Hawthorne_. He smiles faintly.

“Will you be my tribute?”

She knows what this means. She knows that there are plenty of people who would be jealous to be put in the position she is. He is someone they pray to frequently out here. But she isn't blinded in need for fame or even favor. Her little family depends on her, and she can't blindly sentence them to death.

“I need to know you'll protect my sister,” Katniss answers evenly. This is a good trade, she tries to tell herself. The promise of a god is no small thing, and Prim will be protected whether she comes home or not. 

“I'll arrange it,” he answers. She can't tell if he's sad or pleased. He goes, taking her arrow with him.

o4. _Primrose and the god of light_

Mellark plays by different rules than the rest of them. They all teem for tributes to fight in their name, to spill blood for them. They shower their champions with favor. But they need these sacrifices all the same; it keeps them cemented in the hearts and minds of mortals.

Mellark picks a tribute too. But his is the only one who doesn't step foot in the arena. No, his is the opposite of a tribute, one he picks to be saved. One selected to never fight in the arena, one that curries his favor and grace merely by existing. 

( _“I need a favor,” Hawthorne asks. They rarely work together, are not exactly on good terms. But almost all of them will scheme together to make sure the god of war doesn't win again. He's a tough opponent to beat, unbearable with each of his victories. He's been trying to find a way to overthrow Cresta from her newly found throne._

_It's been awhile since Hawthorne has had a tribute win. His are prone to surviving, but give out toward the end._

_“Oh?” Mellark asks._

_He guides Mellark's gaze to the Everdeen family, to the little girl, poised and pretty and kind. Exactly the sort of person Mellark is prone to picking, which makes this an easier favor. But Mellark spies Katniss too, skinning down the deer she had claimed this afternoon._

_“Cresta won't be happy with this sort of interference,” Mellark points out._

_“She won't mind,” Hawthorne promises._

_“All right,” Mellark agrees after a moment's pause. “Prim Everdeen has my protection.”_ )

o5. _Are you killing for yourself or your savior?_

Cresta stands beside him as the games begin. He can feel her power permeating the air, encompassing him. This is the sort of power that comes with having a single mortal win three times in your name. Even the god of war cannot claim this kind of power: He discards his pawns after a single use, moves onto other entertainments. He is fleeting. But the others gather around him in a neat pack this year, thinking that he will reclaim his crown from Cresta again. 

Hawthorne and she stand together though. Mellark is aloof from them all, called to attend, but with no obvious enjoyment of the games the rest of them play. 

Everyone thinks this is a showdown between Cresta's boy, who is golden and perfect, trident in hand, and the girl with the axes. War's girl. She is raw and dark and manipulative, the sort of contender that the god of war loves to subdue into fighting for him.

(Hawthorne feels Katniss like a pulse. She is young, her bow loose in her hand. Almost everyone discredits her, but Mellark is fixated on her as well as if she has become the sun of his small world.)

Cresta smiles when Finnick appears. Awareness pricks through Hawthorne's bloodstream.

“You're in love with him,” he says, surprised, unable to hold back the comment.

Cresta looks up at him, eyes a nighttime blue, tinges of silver flecked around her iris. She says nothing. Hawthorne doesn't understand. This is not something that is new in their realm. But for Cresta, who holds herself at a distance, even from them, it is. He wants to press, but then the games start in earnest. 

Off to a fast start already – Finnick pivots to his left where Johanna is, and suddenly they're at each other. There's a gasp of approval: This is what they thought the finale would be, Finnick and Johanna assessing each other as the main competition. 

Cresta is alert, eyes stormy grey once more. The god of war comes to stand beside her, too close, but Cresta ignores him, head turned away.

Finnick thrusts forward with the trident. Johanna blocks with two of her axes. The clang of the metal reverberates throughout all of them. Johanna lashes out with a well-placed kick that knocks Finnick off balance. He pulls away, crumpling to one side. Johanna veers forward, one of her arms pulled all the way back. She swings at Finnick with an axe. He manages to drop to the ground, putting himself just underneath the blow. 

Johanna follows up neatly, swinging her left hand down. It catches Finnick in the shoulder, and blood splashes across the grass. (There are other battles taking place, other people dying, but no one is looking anywhere else.) 

Finnick transfers the trident into his good hand, and jabs it from the side. The prongs sink into Johanna's calf, and she bears her teeth, feral and hurt. She pulls her axe out of Finnick's shoulder, more blood hitting the air. She rears back for another hit, planning to take his head off.

The arrow slides through the air without warning. The first one hits Johanna in the chest. The second catches her in the throat. Her eyes are wide, surprised. They still are when she lands on the ground beside Finnick.

Everyone is quiet suddenly, looking at Katniss. (His Katniss, Hawthorne thinks, that kill in his name. The god of war wiped from contention.)

Finnick glances over his injured shoulder at Katniss, nods at her. He grabs his trident, and then is off. The initial bloodbath slows. Cresta moves to clean up the souls. (She reunites Johanna Mason with her brothers. It is her right, as the goddess of the underworld, to make any others' tributes wander the levels of hell forever. But she is rarely that cruel, and especially with War's chosen few. They have suffered enough.)

The crowds pivot away from the god of war. They are slow to pick new champions. Cresta is the too obvious choice, Hawthorne the unlikely one. 

Cresta smiles at him, enigmatic, and squeezes his hand before she leaves.

…

It comes down to Finnick and Katniss, and nobody is surprised. Hawthorne and Cresta continue to stand together, and everyone leaves them ringed with space, except for Mellark. In a rare instance, he joins them. 

Finnick is still trailing blood like a ribbon from the shoulder wound, which he tried to bind up. He and Katniss have tried to skirt each other, taking out other opponents. But it comes back around to the two of them. 

(They are not suited to fight each other; Finnick is equipped for short-range combat, Katniss for long.) Katniss tries to track Finnick for awhile, and he tries to evade her. He ends up on the beach. Katniss fires an arrow from the treeline, but Finnick swats it aside. He goes for her. She fumbles to get another arrow into the bow.

(Cresta and Hawthorne hold hands.)

She doesn't manage it in time. Finnick throws the trident, a bold move, but why should he think it should fail? It hasn't before. But Katniss breathes, slides down, mimicking his move from the fight with Joahnna. The trident wedges into a tree. Katniss, on her knees, lines the arrow up. It hits Finnick in the chest. He looks up, surprised. Eyes go skyward for a moment, and then he's stumbling backward. His fingers wrap around the arrow, but it's a pointless gesture. He falls backward into the ocean. 

(“Thank you,” Cresta breathes, kisses Hawthorne on the cheek.)

…

Finnick can't breathe. Darkness is clawing at the inside of his eyes. He's underwater, swallowing the ocean tide.

She wraps her arms around his neck, kisses him, pulls him under. He goes home with her.

…

Mellark doesn't visit Cresta often. They are friends, but their worlds exist at counterpoint, and it's difficult for them to arrange meetings. (She is wrapped up in her mortal boy, claimed by her at last. Her power tides out, Hawthorne's flaring up.)

_“I want to protect Katniss next year,” Mellark says to her._

_“Hawthorne will want to claim her again,” Cresta warns._

_Mellark, his eyes ringed in the light the same golden color of his hair, studies her. The tide comes in, the moon rises, and the light is gone. So is Mellark._

Cresta returns to Finnick, curls up against his mortal warmth, kisses the shadow of a scar over his heart.

“I'm yours,” he whispers to her, running his fingers through her hair.

“And now I'm yours,” she smiles at him.


End file.
